Keeping Hillary Under 71%

The top adviser to K.T. McFarland is taking on John Spencer. Ed Rollins, who ran President Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, told the Associated Press on Friday that “It would be a very big mistake to think John Spencer — no offense to John, who I guess was a decent enough mayor — to move him to a level of where anyone is going to take him seriously as a U.S. Senate candidate.”

Along with saying that Spencer is too conservative to win in New York, Rollins claimed that “[u]nfortunately, John Spencer wouldn’t know which side of the Capitol the U.S. Senate meets.”

Rollins argues that there is no way that wealthy GOP donors who would normally want to defeat Hillary will donate money to Spencer’s campaign, and took issue with state Republican Party chairman Stephen Minarik’s unofficial endorsement of Spencer earlier last week.

Perhaps to spite Minarik, Rollins revealed a private conversation with the party leader, who allegedly said the Republican establishment would consider it a victory to keep Sen. Clinton under the 71% victory vote margin won by New York’s senior senator Sen. Chuck Schumer in his landslide 2004 re-election win over his GOP opponent, who had 24% of the vote. “From my perspective, if getting 24% of the vote is a victory, than we probably need a new party chairman and we probably need a new thought process,” said Rollins.